I was thinking about this "meritocratic vs. democratic" notion this morning, and I think I hit upon a significant divide in how I'm processing things, and how many of my readers are processing things. The fact of the matter is simple---I am black. Most of the people who read this blog, in all likelihood, are white. Our history differs, and most importantly in this case, the make-up of our communities differ.

A guy wrote me yesterday arguing, as a lot of you have argued, that what Ross is really invoking is a "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" ideal. I wrote back asking why Barack Obama could not be a "Mr. Smith." He wrote back the following:

Because his talents are uncommon.

To put my point another way, if I said, "The average American voter
simply can't understand complicated national issues." Your response
would not be "You're wrong; Barack Obama understands complicated
national issues." A response like that would make no sense--Obama is is
a singularly talented individual; he's not just a representative
American voter. In order to have faith in democracy, we have to believe
that a majority of us, not simply the best of us, are capable of making
the right call.

Obama doesn't work as Mr. Smith because Obama is not just your local
boy scouts leader from next door. Obama is a brilliant man. His talent
can't give me faith that my neighbor is making good decisions in the
voting booth because Obama is much smarter than my neighbor.

I think this is a pretty solid argument. But it makes assumptions about the American experience that some of us simply don't share. More to the point this "democratic ideal" is really a euphemism for white populism, and from a black perspective, even white tyranny.

The history is helpful, here. For most of
this country's history, being black and brilliant was not something that set you a part from other black people--it was something that could get you killed by white people. A study of this country's history reveals to not be hyperbole. This
notion that white people of medium talents could rise to rule the world
was not simply "the democratic ideal," it was the tyranny of our
lives--with depressing, disastrous effects. The idea that mediocre white people could rise to incredible levels of power was not so much an ideal for us--it was the whole point of white supremacy.

We obviously live in a different era. But still, one of the most depressing things about being black and "making it" is the incredible randomness of it all. I have said this many times--I was a terrible student. To the extent that intelligence is measurable, I sat in classrooms with people who were smarter than me, worked harder than me, and studied longer than me. I was not without my own gifts--I possessed an obsessive and singular curiosity. I had a vivid imagination. I was creative. But I was also immature and lazy, and if not for the steady prodding/pushing/spanking/cajoling of my parents, I don't think you'd be reading this blog.

When you're black, and likely when you're Latino, and likely when you're a kind of white, you see brilliant people all the time--and they get taken out in the most horrific ways. They have kids too soon. They get shot on the way home from school. They get hooked on crack. They go to jail. And then there is that one kid who makes it, who despite the wages of race in this country, goes on and does something big. To many black people, that person is Barack Obama.

Let's not conflate two arguments--one being the nature of the
democratic ideal, the other being whether it's a good thing. I don't simply argue that it's a bad thing--I argue with the very notion of the "common man" which is assumed by many of my white posters. Rather, I argue that when we talk about the "common man" we actually aren't talking about the same thing.

The black community is intensely segregated--even at the level of the
middle class. It is, by the numbers, the most segregated community in
the country. Add in to that a long history of segregation, that
segregation was specifically invented to keep black people around each
other, and what you have is a community with a level of familiarity that is, on balance, likely less common than the broader, whiter country.

The use of the word neighbor is instructive--Barack Obama hails from the black side of town. And not just any black side of town, but the South Side of Chicago, a place that was the cultural and economic capital of black America for decades. Moreover he isn't simply from our side of town, he actually behaves like the people we know. He gives dap in the manner that we give dap. He plays basketball, our national past-time. He paraphrases Malcolm X. He bops through the Senate chamber. He's married to a black woman, and not just a dark-skinned black woman, but one who is the progeny of working class black Chicago. Before he became president, Barack Obama got his hair cut by the same South Side barber every week, and it looked tight. For black men, that is the democratic ideal.

That he was raised in Hawaii doesn't really mean much to us. I've said this before, if we had to disqualify every black person who was raised around white people, the population at Historically Black Colleges would plummet by a third.

That he's biracial doesn't mean much. If we had to disqualify every biracial black person, we'd lose, in one fell swoop, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Jason Kidd, Halle Berry and Etta James. In short, we'd be in a world of hurt.

That he's Ivy League doesn't mean much to us. I live in Harlem, and some of my black friends here are Ivy League grads, and some aren't. But all of us get off the subway in the evening, look at the kids standing on the corner, sigh to ourselves, and mutter "Damn," under our breath.

My lovely partner Kenyatta, is going to Columbia in the Fall. I guess she's Ivy League, now. But to me, she's still the girl whose great-grandparents were ran out of Mississippi. She's still the girl from Covington, Tennessee. She's still the girl I met at Howard. She's still, like Obama, the product of a single-parent household. She's still raising a black boy in these times, with all the fears that that entails.

I don't want to gloss over the differences in the black community, in terms of class etc. We are human, and, as with any community, we have our fault lines. There is also something to be said for the notion of "acting white," even if it's not clear exactly what. But our differences are not such that we'd look at Barack Obama's election and say, as Ross puts it, "Don't even think about it." Indeed, the response of so many black people has been exactly the opposite--"Now, I can tell my child that he/she can truly do anything."

To the broader country, Barack Obama is exotic. From a black perspective, he is certainly atypical. But what has to be understood is that the whole point of white racism was to lump all black people together. Thus we're quite use to "exotic" black people. Malcolm X's mother was a biracial woman from Grenada. W.E.B. Du Bois was from overwhelmingly white Great Barrington, Massachusetts and traced a mixture of dutch and black ancestry in his family. Arturo Schomburg, the great chronicler of black diasporic history and culture, was Puerto-Rican. Marcus Garvey was Jamaicain. And so on...

Perhaps if you are white, Barack Obama represents the end of the idea that your next door neighbor could be president. But you should consider that just because Barack Obama isn't your next door neighbor, doesn't mean he isn't mine.

Most Popular

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.